Heartful Autoethnography
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1999
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1177/104973299129122153
Abstract
The author seeks to develop an ethnography that includes researchers’ vulnerable selves, emotions, bodies, and spirits; produces evocative stories that create the effect of reality; celebrates concrete experience and intimate detail; examines how human experience is endowed with meaning; is concerned with moral, ethical, and political consequences; encourages compassion and empathy; helps us know how to live and cope; features multiple voices and repositions readers and “subjects” as coparticipants in dialogue; seeks a fusion between social science and literature in which, as Gregory Bateson says, “you are partly blown by the winds of reality and partly an artist creating a composite out of the inner and outer events”; and connects the practices of social science with the living of life. In short, her goal is to extend ethnography to include the heart, the autobiographical, and the artistic text. This article provides a conversation with a student researching breast cancer that introduces issues in heartful autoethnography.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Qualitative Health Research, v. 9, issue 5, p. 669-683
Scholar Commons Citation
Ellis, Carolyn, "Heartful Autoethnography" (1999). Communication Faculty Publications. 261.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/spe_facpub/261
